Dorothy Allison, who wrote with lyrical, pungent wit about her working-class Southern upbringing — and about the incest and violence that shaped her — and whose acclaimed 1992 novel, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” based on her harrowing childhood, made her a literary star, died on Tuesday at her home in Guerneville, Calif., in Sonoma County. Read more
Category: Obituaries
Gary Indiana, Acerbic Cultural Critic and Novelist, Dies at 74
Gary Indiana, the elfin novelist, cultural critic, playwright and artist whose crackling prose and lacerating wit captured the ravages of the AIDS crisis, Manhattan’s downtown art scene, lurid true crimes and his own search for love, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. Read more
Lore Segal, Mordant Novelist of Émigré Life, Dies at 96
Lore Segal, a virtuosic and witty author of autobiographical novels of her life as a young Jewish Viennese refugee in England and as an émigré in America, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. Read more
Robert Coover, Inventive Novelist in Iconoclastic Era, Dies at 92
Robert Coover, who along with Donald Barthelme, John Barth and others occupied the vanguard of postmodern American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and who went on to a long and prolific career writing and teaching, died on Saturday in Warwick, England. Read more
Nelson DeMille, Blockbuster Author Who Thrilled Millions, Dies at 81
Nelson DeMille, a beloved and prolific author whose propulsive thrillers featuring terrorist hijackings, Russian spy schools, gruesome murders, Mafia kingpins, wartime crimes and military malfeasance made him a publishing juggernaut, died on Tuesday in Mineola, N.Y. Read more
Leonard Riggio, Who Built Barnes & Noble Into a Bookselling Empire, Dies at 83
Leonard Riggio, a brash, self-styled underdog who transformed the publishing industry by building Barnes & Noble into the country’s most powerful bookseller before his company was overtaken by the rise of Amazon.com, has died at age 83. Read more
Lewis H. Lapham, Harper’s Editor and Piercing Columnist, Dies at 89
Lewis H. Lapham, the scholarly patrician who edited Harper’s Magazine for nearly three decades, and who in columns, books and later his own magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, attacked what he regarded as the inequities and hypocrisies of American life, died on Tuesday in Rome. Read more
Edna O’Brien, Writer Who Gave Voice to Women’s Passions, Dies at 93
Edna O’Brien, the prolific Irish author whose evocative and explicit stories of loves lost earned her a literary reputation that matched the darkly complex lives of her tragic heroines, died on Saturday. Read more
Robert Towne, Screenwriter of ‘Chinatown’ and More, Dies at 89
Robert Towne, whose screenplay for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” won an Oscar, and whose work on that and other important films established him as one of the leading screenwriters of the so-called New Hollywood, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. Read more
Ismail Kadare, Whose Novels Brought Albania’s Plight to the World, Dies at 88
Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly wrote his isolated Balkan homeland onto the map of world literature, creating often dark, allegorical works that obliquely criticized the country’s totalitarian state, died in Tirana, Albania, on Monday. Read more
